Koha NewsLetter Vol 3 – 2014

Koha Community Newsletter
March 2014

Volume 5, Issue 3
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg and Joanne Dillon, Koha Community Newsletter Editors.

Please submit news items to Submit

Development
Community
Upcoming Events
Past Events
- Report from the Marseille Hackfest 2014
- March General IRC Meeting

Development

Koha 3.14.5 Released

by Fridolin Somers

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.14.5.

This is a maintenance release and contains some enhancements and several bugfixes.
As always you can download the release from Koha Downloads.

See the full release notes and changelog here.

Koha 3.12.12 Released

by Chris Cormack

We are happy to announce the release of Koha 3.12.12.

You can download the release from Koha Downloads.

See the full release notes and changelog here.

New Bootstrap Theme in Koha 3.14

Owen Leonard discusses the features and motivations behind the new “Bootstrap” theme
in Koha 3.14 in a blog post, as well as offering some customization pointers.

Excerpt from Owen’s post:

As of Koha 3.14 the OPAC has a new default theme: Bootstrap. It’s a theme I developed with the intention of offering a flexible, modern, and responsive theme option for Koha libraries. It takes as its visual basis the CCSR theme, added in 3.10. However, it greatly expands the catalog’s mobile-friendliness over the CCSR theme.

The Bootstrap theme is so named because it uses the Bootstrap framework, a set of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet tools for use by web developers to quickly and easily add functionality to sites. Bootstrap helps web developers do things like add menus, dialogs, tooltips, etc. Bootstrap also brings some improved default styling to buttons and forms.

Patches

This is a new section intended to highlight upcoming features as well as bugs needing attention. This first batch of bugs comes from Jonathan Druart at BibLibre.

Batch modifications for records: read description and background in this message to the Koha dev list.
A feature to allow checkouts in a batch: bug 11759
An ergonomic improvement to view funds list: bug 11578
Integration of a complete “In-house use” feature: bug 10860
A search form for items: bug 11425

Related Projects

This is a new section devoted to projects related to Koha.

Chris Cormack reports that work is being done to integrate the following
projects into Koha:

NCIP: OpenNCIP is an open source implementation of the 3M Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) used by self-check terminals and public internet terminals in libraries.

OpenNCIP project page.

NCIP integration is currently in the preliminary testing phase.
ElasticSearch: Elasticsearch is a flexible and powerful open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine.

From ElasticSearch Website

From Chris: “Elasticsearch integration is also progressing well, we are using the Catmandu libraries which has the benefit of making adding Linked Data a lot easier.”

Community

New Koha Libraries

Community Gossip

Kyle Hall, developer and ByWater Solutions team member, has a new family member. Congrats Kyle!

How to

Tim Miller from Redwood College demonstrates some ways in which you can tweak the new Koha Mobile theme in his blogpost Hacking the Koha Mobile Layout.

Sean Park explains how to install a Star TSP100 (TSP143LAN) thermal receipt printer on Ubuntu 12.04 in this blogpost.

In his Did you know blog series this month, Pierre Vandekerckhove covers the following topics:

Support Provider News

Pierre Vandekerckhove from BibLibre posted their Koha Hackfest 2014 Wrap Up, covering the Hackfest in Marseille this March and an accompanying infographic showing attendees, bugs squashed and other fun stuff.

Upcoming Events

KohaCon 2014

KohaCon 2014 will be held in Córdoba, Argentina, October 2014.

For the schedule and registration details see the
KohaCon page.

North American Koha Users Group

The North American Koha Users Group will be held in Wenatchee, WA, August 2014.

For the schedule and registration details see the
North American Koha Users Group page.

2 Day Training on KOHA in Trivandrum, India

KLA Centre for Professional Development (KLA-CPD), Trivandrum, offers 2 Day Training on KOHA on April 12 & 13, 2014

Details at the KLA Blog

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting will be held on April 9th 2014 at 15:00 and 21:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information are here

Past Events

Report from the Marseille Hackfest 2014

by Romana Franziska Wallner

On March 10th/11th 2014, Stefano Bargioni attended the Koha Hackfest in Marseille, France, organized by BibLibre. Stefano presented the Koha project ES4K to developers from all around the world. The presentation was most warmly received, and most gave positive feedback.

The feedback results from the Hackfest presentation were then presented at the “4th Koha Italian Annual Meeting” in Milan at the National Conference “Le Stelline”. During this conference in Milan, the participants heard from 4 important Italian libraries (Franco Serantini Library, Library of Pontificia Università “San Tommaso d’Aquino”, Biblioteca of the Istituto Svedese di Studi Classici and Biblioteche del Lavoro CGIL) who have recently successfully implemented Koha as their ILS.

Additionally, the Koha Gruppo Italiano (KohaGruppoItaliano) had the opportunity to personally meet with Brendan A. Gallagher and Jesse Maseto, from ByWater Solutions, in order to further discuss the ES4K Project, and to definitively launch it.